The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is demanding Fox News for defamation, claiming that the media intentionally manipulated a video to make the appearance that the governor lied about a phone call with President Trump.
The governor's demand of $ 787 million in punitive damages increases his aggressive effort to challenge erroneous information. The lawsuit, announced on Friday, places the news at the forefront of the war of political power between the Democrats and the Republicans by the press challenging an exit that many in their party despise.
“When ignoring the basic journalistic ethics in favor of malicious propaganda, Fox continues to play an important role in the additional erosion of the principles of base of the reported representative government,” says the demand.
The demand comes from the comments Trump made about a phone call with Newsom while the tensions were heated between the two leaders for the immigration raids and the president's decision to deploy the National Guard in the streets of Los Angeles.
Trump told journalists on June 10 that he spoke with Newsom “a day ago.”
“He called him to tell him, he had to do a better job, he's doing a bad job,” Trump said. “Causing a lot of death and a lot of potential death.”
Newsom immediately refuted Trump's timeline on social networks.
The governor had already spoken publicly about talking with Trump on the phone at the end of the night of June 6 in California, which was at the beginning of June 7 for Trump on the east coast. Newsom said the National Guard was never discussed during that call. They didn't talk again, said Newsom.
“There was no call,” Newsom published in X. “Not even a voice mail. Americans should be alarmed that a president display the Marines in our streets does not even know who he is talking to.”
Newsom's lawyers allege in the complaint that when the call seems more recent, Trump could suggest that they discussed the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, what they did not have.
Trump tried to shoot Newsom through Fox and shared a screenshot of his call record with presenter John Roberts. The record showed that a phone call occurred on June 7 and did not provide evidence of a call on June 9 as Trump said.
“It is impossible to know with certainty whether the distortion of President Trump was intentionally misleading or simply the result of his poor cognitive state, but Fox's decision to cover up the false statement of the president cannot be fired so easily,” says the complaint.
Newsom's legal team said Roberts initially misrepresented the situation for spectators. Then, during a night broadcast on June 10, Fox News presenter, Jesse Watters, showed a video of Trump's comments about the phone call, but omitted the president saying that he happened “a day ago.” The edition made it seem that Newsom claimed that the two never spoke at all.
“Why would Newsom lie and affirm that Trump never called it? Why would that?” Watters then asked.
Fox News criticized Newsom for attacking freedom of expression.
“The transparent advertising trick of Governor Newsom is frivolous and is designed to relax the critical expression of him. We will defend this case vigorously and hope to be fired,” Fox News said in a statement on Friday morning.
Newsom is particularly sensitive to its critics in Fox, a conservative television network that describes how the epicenter of a right -wing media ecosystem that deceives the public to benefit Trump and his allies.
The amount of the governor's damage was a subtle excavation at the exit.
Fox agreed two years ago to pay Dominion's voting systems an agreement of $ 787 million to eliminate a lawsuit against false statements from the network that voting machines were manipulated to help President Biden win the 2020 elections.
In a letter to Fox, Newsom's lawyers said they will voluntarily rule out the lawsuit if the medium retracts their statements that he lied about talking to Trump.
“We hope you will give the same air time to retract these falsehoods while you spent presenting and amplifying them,” said their lawyers. “In addition, Mr. Watters and Fox News must emit a formal apology in the air because of the lie that has spread over Governor Newsom.”
